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Remy wants to be able to apply progressive enhancement to React: server-side and client-side rendering, sharing the same codebase. He succeeded, but…

In my opinion, an individual or a team starting out, or without the will, aren’t going to use progressive enhancement in their approach to applying server side rendering to a React app. I don’t believe this is by choice, I think it’s simply because React lends itself so strongly to client-side, that I can see how it’s easy to oversee how you could start on the server and progressive enhance upwards to a rich client side experience.

I’m hopeful that future iterations of React will make this a smoother option.

Progressive enhancement’s core value proposition, for me, is that HTML and CSS have features that are powerful in their own right. Using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript together makes for more reliable products than just using Javascript alone in a single-page-app.

This philosophy doesn’t apply to every website out there, but it sure as hell applies to a lot of them.

We all make assumptions, it’s natural and normal. But we also need to be jolted out of those assumptions on a regular basis to help us see that not everyone uses the web the way we do. I’ve talked about loving doing support for that reason, but I also love it when I’m on a slow network, it shows me how some people experience the web all the time; that’s good for me.

I’m privileged to have fast devices and fast, broadband internet, along with a lot of other privileges. Not remembering that privilege while I work and assuming that everyone is like me is, quite possibly, one of the biggest mistakes I can make.

Mandy is fighting the good fight for the open web from within Vox Media. Her publishing tools have been built with a secret weapon…

This practice — which I refer to unoriginally as progressively enhanced storytelling — also has the added benefit of helping us make our content more accessible to more kinds of users, especially those with disabilities.

Progressive enhancement embraces the idea of experience as a continuum rather than some singular ideal.

Progressive enhancement should not be viewed as a challenge to JavaScript any more than concepts like namespacing, test driven development, or file concatenation & minification are; it’s just another way to improve your code.

Progressive enhancement’s focus on providing a baseline experience that makes no assumptions about browser features will provide a robust foundation for any project.

Riffing on an offhand comment I made about progressive enhancement being a form of “technical credit”, Chris dives deep into what exactly that means. There’s some really great thinking here.

With such a wide array of both expected and unexpected properties of the current technological revolution, building our systems in such a way to both be resilient to potential failures and benefit from unanticipated events surely is a no-brainer.

This is a truly fantastic example of progressive enhancement applied to a form.

What I love about this is that it shows how progressive enhancement isn’t a binary on/off choice: there are layers and layers of enhancements here, from simple inline validation all the way to service workers and background sync, with many options in between.

This is such a great perspective on what it’s like to build for the web over the long term. The web will always be a little bit broken, and that’s okay—we can plan for that.

The Web has history. If you build with web technology it will stick around. We try not to break the web even if it means the mistakes and bad decisions we have made in the past (and will make in the future) get set in stone.

Never feel like it’s a waste to dedicate time to the enhancements; to put real thought and effort into your animations and what they’ll contribute to the experience. Progressive enhancement is all about freeing up your time to make the enhancements great once you’ve got that basic core functionality covered. That’s the path to making new and wonderful things on the web while also being responsible. It’s quite literally a way to get the best of both worlds.